> David Rodgers wrote:
>
> I need to turn disk buffering and caching off ........ my machine hung
> and died today for the second time because the buff/cache ate all the
> memory .. i was running top at the time and the buff/cache was
> accounting for all but 15mb of 2 gigs of ram ....... there is no need
> for disk buffering for a mail server anyway ....... the data being
> read changes from minute to minute
>
>
> David Rodgers
Okay, this is the third message from you that's had HTML on. Turn it
off.
You can turn off some parts of the buffering by using the hdparm
command. I don't recall the specifics of tuning the kernel to reduce
buffering and caching, but I do remember that there is limited
documentation for it in /usr/src/linux/Documentation.
That said, it really sounds like there's something drastically wrong
with that machine. Machines do not hang and die from buffering and
caching.
Finally, that buffering of disk reads and writes is giving you
performance that you wouldn't get if you did the reads or writes
individually. Despite the rate of change that you see, a minute is an
eternity to a modern system. The difference between reading data out of
a nanosecond cache and a millisecond drive access is huge.
--
Steve Philp
Network Administrator
Advance Packaging Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
